I think you and I are the only ones that wanted a larger screen.
I wanted it to be the same overall size as Vanity Fair magazine, with the resolution at least proportionally greater, if not slightly higher PPI.
At that size, I think it would be a pixel-pixel replacement for magazines and more usable for newspapers. Current magazine apps, with the possible exception of Zinio's format, break the magazine too much. I like the New Yorker but that app, as good as it is, makes it frustrating to read.
I used to think that way about iPhones before I got my 3G (then 3GS, now 4), having replaced batteries on previous cell phones a couple of times every couple of years.
I have yet to do that on an iPhone. It doesn't last as long as I'd like, but I also use it a lot and no phone I've owned has really lasted more than a couple of days with any use.
For travel, a Mophie JuicePack Air provides nearly double the internal battery at marginal cost of heft.
My wifi iPad, though seems to last forever on a charge. "Normal" use of a couple of hours a night and I might not charge it for 4-5 DAYS.
I worked at a print prepress business for a while in the mid 90s and while Macs got used for Quark page layout, all the "high end" graphics where real magic needed to happen were done on a quad-processor SGI workstation with a massive display and Barco software.
Anyway, the real time it should have happened was the late 1990s when Mac OS couldn't do SMP or real pre-emptive multitasking and PowerPC wasn't keeping up with Intel CPUs.
The open question is whether the software heavy lifting for putting the Mac OS GUI as it was then would have gotten done well (or at all).
....deletes all your email, like Google did recently, what then? Or when a physical device doesn't work well enough to work with the cloud?
I agree that the cloud concept makes a lot of sense, but speaking as a full time SMB IT consultant, your computer, local network, and internet service have to be pretty much working for the cloud concept to work, and I spend most of my time dealing with problems that cause the cloud to stop working altogether.
Really? Smartphones can be careful or careless? Their owners may have that attribute, but I doubt behavioral attributes based on cognition can be applied to even the smartest smart phones.
Without debating the merits of closed versus open, this is really an attempt to blame the user for the infection and not the application security model or the inherent insecurity of third party application marketplaces, IMHO, to avoid the inevitable comparison with Apple's closed model and not put the blame on Android where at least some of the blame belongs.
Really -- you're focusing on lost desktop space and some kind of extra effort to delete files "permanently"?
IMHO, the bigger issue is that the Trash (MS called it Recycle because it sounded more PC and Apple already had a Trash) metaphor combined with large disk drives allows people to turn the Trash into a storage place (like Outlook's Deleted Items).
OK, this is and of itself isn't an issue, but periodically the trash gets emptied and then usually someone (sorry, women in marketing, but you're the most common victims) is on the war path because the trash worked like it was supposed to.
It'd make more sense if there was a trash "policy" that was time based and not disk space based. Like trash at home, it gets "deleted" every week when the garbage man comes.
At the time in the mid 90s, SGI was still something of a leader in high end visualization, graphics, animation, 3D. Apple was a leader in easy-to-use GUI and pretty much the only game in town for 2D graphics and publishing.
I always saw it as a good fit, with SGI providing the datacenter/high end technology Apple lacked while Apple could provide SGI with the end-user interface they lacked and the desktop-type end users.
The OS merger would have been OS X before OS X -- IRIX back end with the Mac OS GUI.
I think one of the larger problems he has is "What if his mercenaries win?" That's a tough genie to get back into the bottle when you have ridden roughshod over your own people and don't have anything resembling a strong, unified and certainly not loyal national army.
Given Libya's location in historical Carthage and its historical ties with Rome, I would expect even Quadaffi to have some sense of what happens to a leader when he becomes too dependent on his Praetorian guard.
The "good" news for Quadaffi is that from the photos I've seen, many of the mercenaries appear to black Africans. Given the historical antipathy between Arab north Africans and black sub-Saharan Africans, his mercenaries have a strong motivation to fight. There's no blending in if they lose and I would expect the Libyan Arab populace to exercise extreme prejudice if and when they are given the chance.
The bad news is they will be pretty ineffective when the money and ammunition runs low.
I think at one time collaboration was a group of people in a room and a stenographer and/or a secretary transcribing the changes of the people in the room.
He's got a pretty small fighting force comprised of mercenaries and what amounts to a small Praetorian guard left on his side; there have been mass defections from him and his hold on actual real estate is pretty small.
My sense is that he might hold out another week or two, but the whole thing is running on a cash and carry basis and with the chaos and world opinion, cash won't hold out. The defections are already legion.
I'm not sure what Europe is supposed to "do", either -- occupy Libya? Mount an air campaign against Qadafi's strongholds? Even if the Europeans had a sea lift capability, European public opinion -- and public treasuries -- would not support it. It would probably also be counter-productive to the Arab "street" and larger Arab diplomacy.
I'd just delete PRC and call it "government complicity".
That something like this shows up in the PRC makes it easy to assume that CPC/PLA were involved, but how do we know some other country isn't doing what you might call "target area testing" with their own software that's designed to be deployed in the PRC or even elsewhere?
My sense is that PRC economy, especially the digital side of it, is probably "open" enough to allow other intelligence communities to operate with relative freedom. And if something like this gets noticed, it's really easy to brush it off as a CPC/PLA/Intelligence operation.
And given the need-to-know/secrecy generally associated with totalitarian societies, even those agencies that are *pegged* to be involved may believe "the other home team" is the one doing it, not them, or other internal arms they don't know about of their own organizations. When you live in a hall of mirrors, it's hard to know what's your reflection and what's someone else's...
I think you're right about the carrier's financial motivations and mostly right about the handset maker, although they do have a slight motivation to be kind to the consumer since they will probably want repeat business from them.
But both of these things are moot if Google forces them to allow end-user software updates by structuring Android licensing correctly. They could limit derivative works so that carriers and handset makers don't bastardize the core OS so much that they make Google-supplied OS updates impossible.
Even if a release still requires a handset maker port (I don't know enough about Android or handset OSes to know how tightly integrated hardware gets with the OS or whether it follows a more traditional OS/driver abstraction model), keeping deviations to a minimum prevents the "easy out" makers have now of saying "its too much work".
The carriers (especially Verizon!) are harder to bring to the table because they will probably balk at any arrangement that doesn't allow them to "brand" phone handsets and add one-click access to accidental data usage and their high-margin content downloads businesses.
Could Google slightly change the "rules" for Android to keep release cycles and the released base a little tighter?
I'm an admitted iPhone addict and one of the things that keeps me from looking at Android is going back to the world of waiting for the carrier to "approve" or distribute OS updates and the sinking feeling that they won't ever approve them (so you'll re-up and get a new phone...)
If Google could tweak their language a tad, maybe they could coerce handset makers and carriers to either more frequently approve updates or allow customers to bypass the vendor and carrier and self-install. This might also require rules designed to keep handset makers and/or carriers from de-standardizing Android so much that updates can't be applied or are onerous to create (which gives them an excuse to not create them...)
They might also create a "new device sunset" date for specific Android revisions so that vendors can't release an "obsolete" Android version on new hardware, promising updates that they never deliver as they chase after the next hot thing.
I realize it might be 'handy', but that difference does not justify a new purchase.
I love the man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Handiness is also called "utility" --- many things in life have a utility value that doesn't quantify well and has a lot of value judgement.
I'm sure you'd consider driving 20 miles with a load of lumber handier than walking the same distance with the same load -- would that justify a motor vehicle purchase?
Or would you just argue against the lumber purchase or what it would build as an argument not to have a vehicle?
Really? Since when does the threat of something being stolen make it too expensive? Your car, your watch, etc are all easy to steal but that doesn't stop many people from spending hundreds or thousands on watches or $50k+ on cars. And since when is a tablet easier to steal than a laptop?
Missing from the article's analysis for the most part was the value proposition -- why do people spend more for an iPad than they might on a laptop which can do more? Simplicity of operation, form-factor, applications aren't massable against silver but have value to the people who buy tablets.
My sense is that they might cost too much to become disposably ubiquitous now, but arguing their current popularity and mindshare won't lead to more models, cheaper parts and the usual march toward lower cost just seems naive.
Right now they are somewhat more expensive because the technology isn't free (flash, capacitive touch screens) and the R&D that goes into their usefulness isn't either.
Why not a future poor man's tablet based on networked storage and remote program execution? Figure the innards at 1/3 of current prices based on reduced parts count, manufacturing improvements and economies of scale and they may be the new $19.99 cell phone.
What I worry about are the 23872832387 "health information sharing authorization" forms I'm basically required to sign every time I do anything remotely related to my health care, whether in the physician's office, renewing benefits at work, etc.
With paper records, the insurance companies, employers, and others who are constantly looking for a way to use your health status against you had to work a damn sight harder to get their hands on this info.
With electronic records, it makes it much easier for people who formerly wouldn't be able to make sharp-pencil decisions about coverage or other tangential decisions to make your life harder.
I'm sure somehow electronic records make healthcare "more efficient" but at the same time the controls and aggregation of this data in the hands of people whose mission is to make Lloyd Blankfein richer scares me. I'm sure it's a problem long-term, but there are a number of issues I won't discuss with my doctor because once into the computer, I'm afraid of where they'll go.
I liked Heavy Metal and Avatar was fun to watch, but Avatar's biggest problem was morality-driven plot simpler than "do good" books you'd give to a six year old. From a story perspective, Heavy Metal seemed more involved (and fairly non-linear given the segments involved different characters and animation styles).
IMHO, "good" movies for adults have plots that share the real world's complexities, moral ambiguities and trade-offs. Nothing in the real world is as straightforward and simple as the dumb plot in Avatar.
I really wish they would come up with a standard for external displays and input for mobile phones.
A standard would allow things like a phone slot in your car that would enable your phone's full UI to appear on your car's larger touch display, enabling music/phone/apps in the car in a way that exceeds "ipod integration" and the lame, out of date software experience most cars provide on in-dash electronics, as well as providing an ergonomic experience (steering-wheel mounted controls for music, volume, phone) more appropriate for behind the wheel.
I'm semi-surprised Apple hasn't already gone there, given the number of carmakers that provide interfaces compatible with Apple's iPod. Are there technical limitations that would preclude this for the iPhone? Even if it "only" included the standard display 2x zoomed (ala the iPad's execution of iPhone apps), it would be a lot nicer than even a phone on a Pro-clip type mount.
And this is just cars -- I can imagine TVs with these slots and "remote controls" that provide touch interfaces, etc.
Sounds like the Equallogic model. I've always wondered what kind of actual bandwidth you get and how it gets spread out, I can get never get a straight answer from our Equallogic rep and the management software doesn't really give you any idea beyond simple bytecounts per physical interface.
In most of the setups I've been around (recent model PS4000 and PS6000s) using the ESX 4.1 sofiware iSCSI initiator, we see real disk throughput top out around 60 MByte/sec in any given VM with basically no other ongoing disk I/O.
When we've used QLogic hardware initiators throughput seems to be about 10-15% better and with lower host CPU utilization, but the performance is close enough and host CPU is largely irrelevant so most people aren't willing to pay.
I like the Equallogics, they seem reliable and are easy to work with, but I'm a little skeptical on the "magic" behind their NIC setup and the ability to deliver more than 1 Gbit/sec to any host.
I just bought my wife a HP Pavilion DM4. Knowing that bloatware would be a problem, I created the restore DVDs (8!) and wiped the disk. When re-setting up, I downloaded the drivers for my specific model (DM4-1253cl) but wifi would not work with either the Intel or the other (Raytech?) driver.
In desperation, I did a restore and lo and behold, the hardware for wifi is Broadcom. Yet HP offers NO Broadcom drivers for wifi to download. Fortunately the restore leaves a directory with all the right drivers, so I copied those and was able to do a clean install.
My other gripe, which I think is related, is HP, and I'm sure others, habit of having umbrella model numbers (DM4) and then 20 or more variations. I'm assuming my model isn't a 1253cl but some other similar model, that, or HP switched parts and the web site never got updated. The latter is likely -- I discovered this morning the download page for the ML330 G3 server doesnt offer drivers for the LSI CSB6 IDE RAID controller, either, and it's on the machine in front of me's mainboard.
What I hear in this are echoes of the paranoid and totalitarian political culture.
I work for a Russian who is a naturalized American, but was raised in Russia and went to Russian university. His father was fairly high ranking officer in the Red Army (a rank roughly equivalent to Colonel).
While personally he's a very nice guy, professionally you can just see the the totalitarian/paranoia culture that was ingrained in him from an early age. The lack of communication & sharing of information, withholding details, cover-ups and denials when obvious mistakes are made, meetings are run like a Party indoctrination session -- we sit and listen, he reads off his itinerary, which is not shared until the meeting starts.
When I first started, I disagreed with him "publicly" at a meeting and I got this weird appeal from him privately about the issue. "I am your manager, you need to agree with me on this." I told him pointedly that I was unswayed by the merits of his argument and would not agree with him, but as an employee, I would go along with his wishes on the issue in question. He seemed really unsatisfied with this and really wanted agreement with him, not just professional cooperation.
The saving grace is that you can call him on this and he's very gracious about not doing it in that specific situation, but he's seems unable to change generally. And I don't work with him on a one-one basis almost ever, which also helps.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm waiting for the rack mount version, then I expect to see them racked at least 8 high.
I think you and I are the only ones that wanted a larger screen.
I wanted it to be the same overall size as Vanity Fair magazine, with the resolution at least proportionally greater, if not slightly higher PPI.
At that size, I think it would be a pixel-pixel replacement for magazines and more usable for newspapers. Current magazine apps, with the possible exception of Zinio's format, break the magazine too much. I like the New Yorker but that app, as good as it is, makes it frustrating to read.
"The food was terrible and the portions were too small."
I used to think that way about iPhones before I got my 3G (then 3GS, now 4), having replaced batteries on previous cell phones a couple of times every couple of years.
I have yet to do that on an iPhone. It doesn't last as long as I'd like, but I also use it a lot and no phone I've owned has really lasted more than a couple of days with any use.
For travel, a Mophie JuicePack Air provides nearly double the internal battery at marginal cost of heft.
My wifi iPad, though seems to last forever on a charge. "Normal" use of a couple of hours a night and I might not charge it for 4-5 DAYS.
I worked at a print prepress business for a while in the mid 90s and while Macs got used for Quark page layout, all the "high end" graphics where real magic needed to happen were done on a quad-processor SGI workstation with a massive display and Barco software.
Anyway, the real time it should have happened was the late 1990s when Mac OS couldn't do SMP or real pre-emptive multitasking and PowerPC wasn't keeping up with Intel CPUs.
The open question is whether the software heavy lifting for putting the Mac OS GUI as it was then would have gotten done well (or at all).
You forgot the "for some users" part.
....deletes all your email, like Google did recently, what then? Or when a physical device doesn't work well enough to work with the cloud?
I agree that the cloud concept makes a lot of sense, but speaking as a full time SMB IT consultant, your computer, local network, and internet service have to be pretty much working for the cloud concept to work, and I spend most of my time dealing with problems that cause the cloud to stop working altogether.
Really? Smartphones can be careful or careless? Their owners may have that attribute, but I doubt behavioral attributes based on cognition can be applied to even the smartest smart phones.
Without debating the merits of closed versus open, this is really an attempt to blame the user for the infection and not the application security model or the inherent insecurity of third party application marketplaces, IMHO, to avoid the inevitable comparison with Apple's closed model and not put the blame on Android where at least some of the blame belongs.
Really -- you're focusing on lost desktop space and some kind of extra effort to delete files "permanently"?
IMHO, the bigger issue is that the Trash (MS called it Recycle because it sounded more PC and Apple already had a Trash) metaphor combined with large disk drives allows people to turn the Trash into a storage place (like Outlook's Deleted Items).
OK, this is and of itself isn't an issue, but periodically the trash gets emptied and then usually someone (sorry, women in marketing, but you're the most common victims) is on the war path because the trash worked like it was supposed to.
It'd make more sense if there was a trash "policy" that was time based and not disk space based. Like trash at home, it gets "deleted" every week when the garbage man comes.
At the time in the mid 90s, SGI was still something of a leader in high end visualization, graphics, animation, 3D. Apple was a leader in easy-to-use GUI and pretty much the only game in town for 2D graphics and publishing.
I always saw it as a good fit, with SGI providing the datacenter/high end technology Apple lacked while Apple could provide SGI with the end-user interface they lacked and the desktop-type end users.
The OS merger would have been OS X before OS X -- IRIX back end with the Mac OS GUI.
I think one of the larger problems he has is "What if his mercenaries win?" That's a tough genie to get back into the bottle when you have ridden roughshod over your own people and don't have anything resembling a strong, unified and certainly not loyal national army.
Given Libya's location in historical Carthage and its historical ties with Rome, I would expect even Quadaffi to have some sense of what happens to a leader when he becomes too dependent on his Praetorian guard.
The "good" news for Quadaffi is that from the photos I've seen, many of the mercenaries appear to black Africans. Given the historical antipathy between Arab north Africans and black sub-Saharan Africans, his mercenaries have a strong motivation to fight. There's no blending in if they lose and I would expect the Libyan Arab populace to exercise extreme prejudice if and when they are given the chance.
The bad news is they will be pretty ineffective when the money and ammunition runs low.
I think at one time collaboration was a group of people in a room and a stenographer and/or a secretary transcribing the changes of the people in the room.
Major risk -- this could quickly backfire and turn into "the US started this" or "the US is occupying another Arab country".
This isn't "clear" at all.
He's got a pretty small fighting force comprised of mercenaries and what amounts to a small Praetorian guard left on his side; there have been mass defections from him and his hold on actual real estate is pretty small.
My sense is that he might hold out another week or two, but the whole thing is running on a cash and carry basis and with the chaos and world opinion, cash won't hold out. The defections are already legion.
I'm not sure what Europe is supposed to "do", either -- occupy Libya? Mount an air campaign against Qadafi's strongholds? Even if the Europeans had a sea lift capability, European public opinion -- and public treasuries -- would not support it. It would probably also be counter-productive to the Arab "street" and larger Arab diplomacy.
I'd just delete PRC and call it "government complicity".
That something like this shows up in the PRC makes it easy to assume that CPC/PLA were involved, but how do we know some other country isn't doing what you might call "target area testing" with their own software that's designed to be deployed in the PRC or even elsewhere?
My sense is that PRC economy, especially the digital side of it, is probably "open" enough to allow other intelligence communities to operate with relative freedom. And if something like this gets noticed, it's really easy to brush it off as a CPC/PLA/Intelligence operation.
And given the need-to-know/secrecy generally associated with totalitarian societies, even those agencies that are *pegged* to be involved may believe "the other home team" is the one doing it, not them, or other internal arms they don't know about of their own organizations. When you live in a hall of mirrors, it's hard to know what's your reflection and what's someone else's...
I think you're right about the carrier's financial motivations and mostly right about the handset maker, although they do have a slight motivation to be kind to the consumer since they will probably want repeat business from them.
But both of these things are moot if Google forces them to allow end-user software updates by structuring Android licensing correctly. They could limit derivative works so that carriers and handset makers don't bastardize the core OS so much that they make Google-supplied OS updates impossible.
Even if a release still requires a handset maker port (I don't know enough about Android or handset OSes to know how tightly integrated hardware gets with the OS or whether it follows a more traditional OS/driver abstraction model), keeping deviations to a minimum prevents the "easy out" makers have now of saying "its too much work".
The carriers (especially Verizon!) are harder to bring to the table because they will probably balk at any arrangement that doesn't allow them to "brand" phone handsets and add one-click access to accidental data usage and their high-margin content downloads businesses.
Could Google slightly change the "rules" for Android to keep release cycles and the released base a little tighter?
I'm an admitted iPhone addict and one of the things that keeps me from looking at Android is going back to the world of waiting for the carrier to "approve" or distribute OS updates and the sinking feeling that they won't ever approve them (so you'll re-up and get a new phone...)
If Google could tweak their language a tad, maybe they could coerce handset makers and carriers to either more frequently approve updates or allow customers to bypass the vendor and carrier and self-install. This might also require rules designed to keep handset makers and/or carriers from de-standardizing Android so much that updates can't be applied or are onerous to create (which gives them an excuse to not create them...)
They might also create a "new device sunset" date for specific Android revisions so that vendors can't release an "obsolete" Android version on new hardware, promising updates that they never deliver as they chase after the next hot thing.
I realize it might be 'handy', but that difference does not justify a new purchase.
I love the man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Handiness is also called "utility" --- many things in life have a utility value that doesn't quantify well and has a lot of value judgement.
I'm sure you'd consider driving 20 miles with a load of lumber handier than walking the same distance with the same load -- would that justify a motor vehicle purchase?
Or would you just argue against the lumber purchase or what it would build as an argument not to have a vehicle?
Really? Since when does the threat of something being stolen make it too expensive? Your car, your watch, etc are all easy to steal but that doesn't stop many people from spending hundreds or thousands on watches or $50k+ on cars. And since when is a tablet easier to steal than a laptop?
Missing from the article's analysis for the most part was the value proposition -- why do people spend more for an iPad than they might on a laptop which can do more? Simplicity of operation, form-factor, applications aren't massable against silver but have value to the people who buy tablets.
My sense is that they might cost too much to become disposably ubiquitous now, but arguing their current popularity and mindshare won't lead to more models, cheaper parts and the usual march toward lower cost just seems naive.
Right now they are somewhat more expensive because the technology isn't free (flash, capacitive touch screens) and the R&D that goes into their usefulness isn't either.
Why not a future poor man's tablet based on networked storage and remote program execution? Figure the innards at 1/3 of current prices based on reduced parts count, manufacturing improvements and economies of scale and they may be the new $19.99 cell phone.
...or Betty in Records getting snoopy.
What I worry about are the 23872832387 "health information sharing authorization" forms I'm basically required to sign every time I do anything remotely related to my health care, whether in the physician's office, renewing benefits at work, etc.
With paper records, the insurance companies, employers, and others who are constantly looking for a way to use your health status against you had to work a damn sight harder to get their hands on this info.
With electronic records, it makes it much easier for people who formerly wouldn't be able to make sharp-pencil decisions about coverage or other tangential decisions to make your life harder.
I'm sure somehow electronic records make healthcare "more efficient" but at the same time the controls and aggregation of this data in the hands of people whose mission is to make Lloyd Blankfein richer scares me. I'm sure it's a problem long-term, but there are a number of issues I won't discuss with my doctor because once into the computer, I'm afraid of where they'll go.
I liked Heavy Metal and Avatar was fun to watch, but Avatar's biggest problem was morality-driven plot simpler than "do good" books you'd give to a six year old. From a story perspective, Heavy Metal seemed more involved (and fairly non-linear given the segments involved different characters and animation styles).
IMHO, "good" movies for adults have plots that share the real world's complexities, moral ambiguities and trade-offs. Nothing in the real world is as straightforward and simple as the dumb plot in Avatar.
I really wish they would come up with a standard for external displays and input for mobile phones.
A standard would allow things like a phone slot in your car that would enable your phone's full UI to appear on your car's larger touch display, enabling music/phone/apps in the car in a way that exceeds "ipod integration" and the lame, out of date software experience most cars provide on in-dash electronics, as well as providing an ergonomic experience (steering-wheel mounted controls for music, volume, phone) more appropriate for behind the wheel.
I'm semi-surprised Apple hasn't already gone there, given the number of carmakers that provide interfaces compatible with Apple's iPod. Are there technical limitations that would preclude this for the iPhone? Even if it "only" included the standard display 2x zoomed (ala the iPad's execution of iPhone apps), it would be a lot nicer than even a phone on a Pro-clip type mount.
And this is just cars -- I can imagine TVs with these slots and "remote controls" that provide touch interfaces, etc.
Sounds like the Equallogic model. I've always wondered what kind of actual bandwidth you get and how it gets spread out, I can get never get a straight answer from our Equallogic rep and the management software doesn't really give you any idea beyond simple bytecounts per physical interface.
In most of the setups I've been around (recent model PS4000 and PS6000s) using the ESX 4.1 sofiware iSCSI initiator, we see real disk throughput top out around 60 MByte/sec in any given VM with basically no other ongoing disk I/O.
When we've used QLogic hardware initiators throughput seems to be about 10-15% better and with lower host CPU utilization, but the performance is close enough and host CPU is largely irrelevant so most people aren't willing to pay.
I like the Equallogics, they seem reliable and are easy to work with, but I'm a little skeptical on the "magic" behind their NIC setup and the ability to deliver more than 1 Gbit/sec to any host.
I just bought my wife a HP Pavilion DM4. Knowing that bloatware would be a problem, I created the restore DVDs (8!) and wiped the disk. When re-setting up, I downloaded the drivers for my specific model (DM4-1253cl) but wifi would not work with either the Intel or the other (Raytech?) driver.
In desperation, I did a restore and lo and behold, the hardware for wifi is Broadcom. Yet HP offers NO Broadcom drivers for wifi to download. Fortunately the restore leaves a directory with all the right drivers, so I copied those and was able to do a clean install.
My other gripe, which I think is related, is HP, and I'm sure others, habit of having umbrella model numbers (DM4) and then 20 or more variations. I'm assuming my model isn't a 1253cl but some other similar model, that, or HP switched parts and the web site never got updated. The latter is likely -- I discovered this morning the download page for the ML330 G3 server doesnt offer drivers for the LSI CSB6 IDE RAID controller, either, and it's on the machine in front of me's mainboard.
What I hear in this are echoes of the paranoid and totalitarian political culture.
I work for a Russian who is a naturalized American, but was raised in Russia and went to Russian university. His father was fairly high ranking officer in the Red Army (a rank roughly equivalent to Colonel).
While personally he's a very nice guy, professionally you can just see the the totalitarian/paranoia culture that was ingrained in him from an early age. The lack of communication & sharing of information, withholding details, cover-ups and denials when obvious mistakes are made, meetings are run like a Party indoctrination session -- we sit and listen, he reads off his itinerary, which is not shared until the meeting starts.
When I first started, I disagreed with him "publicly" at a meeting and I got this weird appeal from him privately about the issue. "I am your manager, you need to agree with me on this." I told him pointedly that I was unswayed by the merits of his argument and would not agree with him, but as an employee, I would go along with his wishes on the issue in question. He seemed really unsatisfied with this and really wanted agreement with him, not just professional cooperation.
The saving grace is that you can call him on this and he's very gracious about not doing it in that specific situation, but he's seems unable to change generally. And I don't work with him on a one-one basis almost ever, which also helps.